Bram Cohen wants to do business on the BitTorrent network

Bram Cohen can easily assemble a Rubik's cube in a minute and a half. He has been working on a computer since he was five. In the transport for half an hour, Bram solves two sudoko puzzles and scores 320 points in Tringo - a mixture of tetris and bingo. This is a man of exceptional abilities. But some tasks even for him are not easy to solve, writes the San Francisco Chronicle.

The fact is that Bram suffers from Asperger syndrome , that is, his social abilities are poorly developed. In patients with Asperger syndrome, narrow but intense interests are also noted, as well as the strangeness of speech and language. In fact, it is a fairly common disease that is diagnosed in at least 1 in 300 children of school age. It is difficult for such people to establish a visual contrast, as well as to catch the intonation in the interlocutor's voice (for example, sarcasm). Among programmers, people with Asperger syndrome are more common.

Thirty-year-old programmer Bram Cohen tries to develop social abilities, look people in the eye and recognize sarcasm. He will definitely need this in order to solve another puzzle: what to do with the BitTorrent peering system, which he created four years ago and which has become the most popular P2P network on the Internet. According to CacheLogic statistics, this network accounts for 30-40 % of all traffic on the Internet. Of course, most of this traffic is pirated content.

The creator of the BitTorrent program is the co-founder and director of a startup of the same name, registered in San Francisco, not far from Hollywood studios, whose content makes up the bulk of traffic within the network. Bram Cohen believes that users need to change their habits and stop downloading pirated music and movies. His company received $ 9 million in venture financing and entered into a contract with Warner Bros., according to which the official sale of television shows and films through the BitTorrent network will begin in the fall.
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But the problem is that people do not want to change their habits. There are big doubts that all 70 million users will start paying for content that they previously received for free. Another problem of BitTorrent is that its software is not so easy to use, so it is much easier for the average person to work with the iTunes store or with some other of the dozens of competitive services.

The main asset of BitTorrent is tens of millions of active users. How many of them will turn from pirates into content buyers will be seen in the fall.